The Traveling Wilburys was the only band George Harrison ever joined outside the Beatles, and it came together by accident. Spontaneity became the band’s backbone, and, strangely enough, Dave Stewart’s kitchen became their base.
Harrison had enjoyed a successful first decade as he adjusted to life after the Fab Four. All Things Must Pass outsold his former bandmates, and — the blighted Dark Horse tour aside — the quiet Beatle had found his voice.
The Traveling Wilburys, completed by Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne, came together in 1988 when Harrison was asked to provide a new B-side for the European release of “This Is Love,” a single from his Cloud Nine album. He and Lynne were in Los Angeles, and with Orbison also around, they decided to record the song at Dylan’s home studio. Petty joined them, and “Handle with Care” began to take shape.
The feeling shared between the musicians as they brought the song to life was mutual, and soon the B-side had become something much bigger. When Harrison played the finished track for Warner Bros., the label decided it was far too good to be buried on the back of a single. Harrison agreed. As he later put it, “I liked the song and the way that it turned out with all these people on it so much that I just carried it around in my pocket for ages thinking, ‘Well what can I do with this thing?’”
His answer was simple: make another nine songs and turn it into an album. Harrison figured it wouldn’t take them very long.
“If we did one song in one day, all we need is nine days to make an album,” he quipped.
As they set about making the album, Harrison’s temporary home proved to be just the place for sharing and hashing out ideas.
“I was great friends with George Harrison,” Dave Stewart tells Uncut in a new interview. “He decided to live in LA for a bit, so he was living in my house with Dhani and Olivia [his son and wife].
“I’d designed the house to have a great sound wherever you were, so the kitchen had a high ceiling with a kind of Mexican fireplace in the middle. [The Wilburys] would write songs sitting on the sofa in the kitchen or around the table, and [drummer] Jim Keltner would play the brushes on the refrigerator. They were having fun.”
Fun was what mattered most to the band. Each member had experienced huge success with their respective bands, rightly making the Traveling Wilburys the biggest supergroup of the 1980s. But it was the band’s playfulness and casual nature, rather than the seriousness that might have come from so many esteemed musicians coming together, that became their glue.
Unfortunately, for the company that Stewart kept, that meant some rather wild surprises.
“I had a friend from Sunderland [England] visit me, who’d never even been to America before,” he continues. “At the same time, Dylan was arriving looking like a vagrant, because he’d just driven from Malibu on his motorbike.
“My friend, he’d already had his mind blown just from arriving [in LA], and then he walked around the corner to see George trying to teach Dylan how to play ‘Taxman’, with Tom joining in. He didn’t say anything, in that classic Northeast way, but I realize now he must have been having a heart attack.”
“It was a nice environment because you could sit outside. It was warm, and the doors were always open,” Petty once said of the sessions at Stewart’s place (via Far Out). “It had a little tiny studio, but it wasn’t a studio; it was more like just a control room, with a vocal booth, so we didn’t have any space to play the guitars.”
The house became one of three home-based locations where the band recorded. Overdubs and mixing were undertaken in England, at Harrison’s Friar Park mansion, while “Handle with Care” was recorded in Bob Dylan’s home studio. That was a song that Petty’s foil, Mike Campbell, was originally due to play the guitar solo on, but he got stage fright in front of his Liverpudlian hero.
The three home studio setups, Mike Campbell’s fears aside, helped forge a cozy atmosphere during the sessions. It’s what Petty remembers most fondly of that first album.
“The Wilburys was this nice friendly thing,” he said. “I'm really proud that I was part of it. Because I do think that it brought a little sunshine into the world.”
